


The Moon Rises Over and Over Again

by ohhtheperiphery



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-08
Updated: 2011-08-08
Packaged: 2017-12-12 07:38:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohhtheperiphery/pseuds/ohhtheperiphery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We are all of us memories, just stories, in the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Moon Rises Over and Over Again

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

       _“Are all people like this?”_  
       _“Like what?”_  
       _“So much bigger on the inside.”_

      — Neil Gaiman, _The Doctor’s Wife_

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“You’ve touched people. Thousands of people. More than that. You understand that, don’t you?”

She trails a finger along his forearm absentmindedly.

“I—I have not—not a _thousand_ ,” he splutters. “I’m not a...you know.”

“A what?”

He leans forward, eyes darting about self-consciously, as if they aren’t alone, safe inside the TARDIS. “An intergalactic manwhore,” he whispers dramatically, punctuating the words by waving his hands in what River is fairly certain was meant to be sincere emphasis, not ridiculous comic relief.

“Doctor,” she sighs, leaning forward to stop his stupid flailing hands by wrapping her own around them, “we both know that wasn’t what I meant.”

If he has a proper reply to that, he doesn’t provide one right away, just sort of “harumphs” and settles back against the bed. “You never know for _certain_ ,” he mutters. “I have issues when it comes to this topic and Ponds.”

“You have issues, that’s what’s certain. Just shut up and take the compliment,” River retorts softly, leaning forward. The low glow of the lights catches in her eyes, in the blurred edge of her hair as it fills out his vision, as she moves in closer, or as he moves less far away.

“I’m sorry,” he sighs. “I’m tired.” And it is a concession, both physical and emotional, mental and spiritual, she knows. She knows him, here, in this place, or more importantly, this time—like he knows her. Like he’s always known her. She wonders if her whole life has been leading up to this, like some sort of child’s toy where each layer of a doll or a box is snapped safe and tight around another layer. And here, in this odd and wonderful center, they are for one terrifying, thrilling moment, on the same elusive and figurative page.

“You should sleep then,” she murmurs, feeling not for the first time like a displaced motherly figure. Brushes his silly hair aside and kisses him gently on the forehead, closing her eyes when he relaxes at her touch, in her hold.

He has probably rarely spoken truer words than those. _Tired_. She sees it in his face, more accurately in his eyes, when he gets like he has tonight, when he worries and worse than that opens himself up to those worries, letting in any hint of the past, of voices long-suppressed but never forgotten in the back of his mind. How exhausting it must be, all that life and all that endless guilt. But she meant what she said—the lives, the people he’s reached have been extraordinary and so large in number she doubts even he truly accepts or believes in their existence. But River knows, knows that aspect of him in ways that he can never know himself, because she’s seen it, because she’s _lived_ it. He’s touched thousands of people and she’s been and will be one of them, and she loves him for that—for all he’s given her and all he’s given the rest of them. So many pieces of himself that once cut away can never be fully returned, will continue to chip away, to hollow out his heart not into something less feeling or less encompassing, but instead into something full of such a private pain.

A private pain. River hates the idea of some suffering locked away so deep inside the Doctor that she can’t help carry any of its burden.

The Doctor stirs against her—a sudden jerking motion that she recognizes as the jolt that comes from being so close to sleep just to be jarred awake at the last moment. “Shh,” she says, and he reaches up, pulls her further against him.

“I love you,” he says, or more mumbles, and she couldn’t explain why that makes her heart ache and soar at the same time if she tried.

“I know,” she says instead.

She isn’t the only or the first or, she hopes in a secret and dark corner of her heart she keeps locked away even from the most conscious layers of herself, the last. What she is is the Now, and what they are are lips meeting and hands moving and skin burning for all the layers of self contained underneath, melding and stirring, each level further in one further down. Not one smaller but rather more immense, exponentially larger for all the distance to the center of the self that they may traverse.

\---

If every story has at least two sides, then what’s to be said for those that have three, or four, or five, or a thousand? What’s said for the spinning fractals of tales gathering speed and tearing randomly and startlingly through the universe, gaining sides and edges as impossible and paradoxical as they are perfect and destined and endless? For the fugues, the snakes turning and devouring their own tails. What’s to be said for these, and more importantly, what isn’t?

Somewhere in the universe on a small speck of dust and light called Earth sits an old man. He is tinier than the country he lives in or the continent he stands on or the planet he exists on, and tinier even for each step beyond that, for each solar system and galaxy fit further around and out from one another, like a Matryoshka doll built up in reverse. And inside his tiny head lies a mind of infinities and worse—of dreams. Inside one of those dreams is a box that is blue and as big as a dream dreaming itself. And inside that box is a man, or at least someone that looks like a man, and from that man radiates a web of intricacies and experiences and relationships that builds itself spiraling out forever from his fingertips, the same web that extends from all the sleeping and dreaming and waking and living people of that Earth which he circles in tireless motions.

What is a story more than the places where these webs knot, where they tangle and intertwine and weave into a whole, a tapestry or a quilt, a blanket to surround the universe and enfold her gently, to sing her to sleep and say to her softly, _we were here we were here we were here we were_.

\---

“How many people do you think have traveled with him?”

“I don’t know. A lot? He’s like...almost a millennium old or something, isn’t he?”

“Yeah. Wow, gross. I wish you wouldn’tve said that.”

“Said what?”

“‘Millennium.’ That’s terrifying.”

“Terrifying?”

“No, well. Yes, but no. Not really. When I say ‘terrifying’ I meant more like ‘incredibly depressing.’”

“Really? Can you imagine all you could accomplish if you lived that long?”

“Yeah, and how much you’d lose.”

“I guess. It seems like a balance that’d be worth it in the end.”

“Yeah. Maybe you’re right. It’s just a bit like, when you put it in those words... If you think about how many years he’s lived you sort of get lost in it, I guess, like he’s a giant open hole that you just keep falling through or further away from the deeper in you go.”

“...Amy?”

“I saw pictures of them, once, you know. I don’t think it was all of them, though. But some of the people he’s traveled with. The TARDIS showed me.” She stops, sighs, looking off at the wall as if across some great distance Rory can’t see there lies all the secrets of the universe written clear as day and just waiting to be read or heard. “We’re just specks, Rory. We’re just these two tiny people passing through his life and someday we’re going to be gone and it could feel like a lifetime or a thousand lifetimes to us but to him it might as well just be a second. I mean,” her voice breaks and she stops, closes her eyes, finds something behind them that wills her to go on, “where do you think they all go? Have they just left? Died? Been lost?”

“I don’t know.” He reaches for her, but she just continues to stare, doesn’t even react when he places a hand on her arm. “Amy,” he repeats her name again, squeezing gently against her forearm.

“It’s so weird. Isn’t it weird, Rory? Say it’s weird.”

“It’s weird,” Rory says gently. Amy finally turns to face him, and he isn’t that surprised but is worried nonetheless to see the dampness in her eyes. “You’re thinking about it too much,” he murmurs, brushes the back of his fingers against the smoothness of her cheek. She laughs, or at least attempts to.

“Rory.” Their eyes lock in a room made of time and light, and Rory almost feels as if he’s being erased in her presence, in the intensity of her eyes; in the way the shadows of this place cast the shape of her face as more beautiful than he’s ever seen her before. He almost has to remind himself to keep breathing.

“I’m glad you’re here with me,” she says.

“I will always be with you,” he promises her.

\---

Amelia Pond dreams of a life one night, a life that terrifies and paralyzes her. A beautiful life, a life full of love and warmth that are slowly draining out of her like water escaping from a funnel, each drip a steady march towards total numbing emptiness. In this life she is married to Rory Williams, and they have children, whole massive hoards of them, filling up a quaint and quiet little house in a quaint and quiet little town on the edge of Something More. It’s the Something More that calls to Amy, in the nights when she dreams inside her dream. The Something More weeds and roots itself intricately and imperceptibly into her subconscious, calls her name out at odd intervals, shadow-phantom voices that dissipate into sunlight, into dust when she turns startled and expectant in their direction.

Who could love her more than Rory Williams, her adoring and so unreasonably kind Rory? But at nights when she wonders over all the half-thoughts and mostly-secrets that she keeps tucked away during the bright and intrusive daytimes, she feels that Something in the pit of her stomach turn, roar a giant ugly head that rises up like a dragon made of pitch and black and hate and points her towards the stars, names her and claims her as someone destined to receive blessings and joys beyond this world, if only she waits, if only she waits, if only. It has eyes made of burning ember and scales of black hardened coal, and at its center, burned and pressing and imminently important, waiting as it instructs her to wait, lays a diamond rooted in, she knows without knowing how or why, the very heart of time.

And in a dreamhouse in the dreamworld that Is and Isn’t and Was and Wasn’t inside Amelia Pond’s spiraling, sleeping mind there is a woman who sits. She lives on a street in a suburban area that Amy knows and then forgets, a woman with red hair who stares at the walls like they might be portals into another world or another life. And all the webs and ringlets of time well up in her veins, pool at inconvenient and unconscious places, stopped and blockaded and held as burrows wedged deep under her skin, splinters she will always feel but never be able to pull out, never follow fully back to the source. She looks at Amy with eyes like the dragon with the diamond heart made of or originating in time (or maybe or probably both and neither), and she tells her: _All we’re left with are our memories. Or, all our memories are left with is us. Or, that isn’t right either. In the end, all we become is a memory, a story, an idea. We are all just rivers, and we each lead by a different path back to the sea._

Amy knows on a level beneath or beyond words then, knows that we shed our bodies like excess layers of skin, reaching molten cores, burning golden lights that hurtle forward unstoppably bright and brilliant into the night until we stretch ourselves far enough to be extinguished in the dead light of those stars, in that welcoming dark.

And in the dream, the beautiful, decaying dream, she watches and holds her dream-children, just shadows, ideas without faces, futures not ready to be realized, still cooking in distant and soon-to-be-forgotten corners of herself. Watches as Rory builds a ship, some kind of mythical ark, except instead of lining the world up two by two and crossing over into a different world on the other side of the rainbow, they’ll go just the two of them, shoot out and exceed the night skies of the earth. Together they will reach the distant cold and looming moon, where they’ll walk airless and light and perfect, hand in hand on its dusty grey surfaces.

The moon will save them. It will wrap them up and envelop them, and only there, far away from this dreamlife of maybe-possibilies and might-have-ifs that she’s terrified of becoming definitely-truths will they be able to hold on, to keep themselves. They will rotate, will gravitate around each other like planets or satellites, in perfect and endless balance until at least the end of eternity. Because if they stay here, growing shadows in the garden and giving them names without faces, she’ll just wither away and chip down like stone, become the sentiment only of a Mrs. Williams in a quaint and quiet house on the edge of Something More that will eat away at her heart until she falls in increments further out of love with a beautiful man that she never, ever wants to fall out of love with.

So Rory builds her a ship in her dreams, and a tiny and hopeful part of her waking self recognizes it as the blue box that crashed into her life on a night that is now as distant and hazy and uncertain as a dream itself, as a dream wrapped inside a dream. And in that dream the moon rises over and over again as Rory works tirelessly into the nights. When she wakes in the morning, she forgets, and somewhere a woman in Chiswick is crying and somewhere in a blue box back (and forward and constant and always) in time the same woman sends a message to a sleeping twenty-year-old Amelia Pond, a cryptic and haunting and beautiful message that links them together in a dreamspace of the always-been and always-forgotten. In the nights that follow, the moon still rises as Amy watches and Amy waits, trying to recall a memory that is at the tip of the tongue of her mind, ready to be spoken but never quite reachable again, lost to some ether of another world.

\---

“Secret,” gasps River.

“W-what?” the Doctor manages in return.

She leans forward, tightening the bonds around his wrists. He yanks unconsciously against them, as if some part of him wants them to be even tighter. And probably, she muses while running a hand down the front of his chest, he does. If there is one thing she knows, it is exactly the type of situations that get her Doctor off.

Usurp his self-assumed authority and he gets so cute and flustered and, if you’re very lucky, just a few shades of perturbed. Anywhere other than in the bedroom, that is. No, here, take control away from him and you’ve got him exactly where you want him—and exactly where he wants himself.

Where he is at the current moment is tied up against the headboard with River straddled across his lap. Their bodies are slick with sweat; she feels it when she presses her chest against his, tastes it when she runs tongue and just a hint of teeth along the side of his jaw. She moves her mouth upwards, trailing with her tongue and tugging ever so slightly on the edge of his ear. He thrusts against her in response; she buries her fingers further into the back of his scalp and pulls.

His groan at that is exquisite. “Just like that,” she encourages, rocking forward with her hips, sending them both moving, while his fingernails dig small crescent-shaped marks into the skin of his palms. “I like it when you make noise,” she whispers in his ear.

“Goddamnit, River.” He moans in approval of that secret, easily eager to play along.

How wonderful is that sound, River thinks—then works her hardest to draw it out of him, to play him like some instrument that has limitless magnitudes of potential which come alive and singing under her fingertips, at the touch of her flesh. She moves him, and he allows her that—it’s a rush to see it, to see that tranquility arising in his face that he can’t seem to find at any other time. He isn’t in control, not here, not now, and that invigorates him, sets him free. _She_ moves _him_ , and the headboard of the bed creaks each time they collide with it, each time it rattles against the wall. She’s got one hand still tangled up and pulling in his hair, one clutching along his neck, fingers slipping in the sweat on the side of his face. They’re moving so fast and it feels so good, so good to watch his expression uncontrolled—and to _hear_ him. He lets her have that, like she asked, like she instructed—doesn’t hold anything back in his throat; moans out in gasps and repetitions of her name, in beautiful mantras breaking around words like _please_.

His face twists, contorts, and he looks almost as if he’s in pain when he comes. River shudders with that crescendo rising up through his body just before breaking.

She holds him, after, his face pressed just against her heart, his breath sending a dull thrill through her where it slows against her skin. She feels light-headed and warm. He makes a small nearly-breathless noise when she unties his hands; she imagines he must be feeling some discomfort as the blood flow returns to normal in them. Regardless, he runs them languidly along her sides, eyes slightly open in the dim lighting of the room. She shivers despite the warmth they share, but doesn’t pull away, still joined for a moment longer, holding him close to her.

“I’ll tell you the best secret of the future,” she murmurs, shifting so that she can press her face into the side of his neck, hide herself inside of him rather than the other way round. Her lips touch lightly at the skin there, punctuating her words.

“What’s that?”

She pauses for the briefest of moments, a pause that hangs, suspended and breathless in the air, like a red-gold leaf trembling on the edge of a branch, waiting for the perfect moment to make its descent and settle with a gentle ripple onto the fragile surface of a lake below.

“I love you.”

She doesn’t look up or move immediately, instead keeping her eyes closed, her head tucked away with lips close but not quite touching his collarbone. If he freezes it is only the minutest of motions, one that she thinks she senses but then loses almost as quickly and imperceptibly.

“River...” he begins, but no. She doesn’t want to hear what he has to say after that—or, she does, of course, but she can’t require him to say anything, to reciprocate. Not here, not now. And although that makes her heart ache so surprisingly literally in her chest, she saves him from having to respond, moving instead to kiss him. He responds to that eagerly, at least. They give to each other what they can, for who and where they are. Even if she’s losing words, losing the man she loves and who she knows loves her—she _promised_ she would hold onto that, swore she would never forget that he loved her, no matter how difficult it would be—even if memories slip out from her fingers like water, leave her numb but so cuttingly empty, she doesn’t and can’t care. They will give to each other what they can, and she will give to him what she always has—everything she is and was and will ever be. Although she is falling back through time into days where he recognizes her less and less, she knows that at least for him, there will come a day, a looming and wonderful Someday when he will give her the same.

\---

“How could I have forgotten him?” Amy asks, running a hand along the wall of their room, lit in the soft orange and blue glow which fills her up like rainwater filling up holes in the ground. The TARDIS has—are the lights dimmed? Romantic setting for their wedding night? She smiles at that. Like the TARDIS setting out a dinner table with candles and roses, if it could. A honeymoon through time and space. And Amy’s still wearing her wedding dress.

When she turns to look at Rory, he’s looking at her, only her, not concerned with the hows or the whys of the situation, just staring at her as if the longer or harder he stares the deeper his gaze will penetrate, the more he’ll be able to understand and hold and be a part of all the places she keeps hidden away from casual view inside herself. Her smile stretches, but suddenly she also feels like crying.

“Amy?”

She walks towards him in decided steps, in easy motions. She clasps his head between both her hands, pressing their foreheads together and breathing in. Rory responds naturally, not possessively but assuredly; his hands are at the small of her back, at the zipper of her dress. His lips are on her lips and all she can think is _how could I ever, ever forget_.

Her beautiful, wonderful boys. First Rory, then the Doctor. But she’ll never forget either of them again. She lays claims into Rory now, with lips and with arms and with every inch of skin exposed to the cool air, the blue lights above, the dim orange glow dusty and dreamlike at their feet. This blue box that crashed into her childhood, which shook her life and then invaded it—it hadn’t forgotten her. She would learn from that, would hold on to that. She would remember.

We are all of us memories, just stories, in the end. Amy thinks she’s heard that somewhere. And as Amy pushes Rory against the ladder of their stupid bunk beds, they both laugh, and the TARDIS might be laughing too, somewhere in the rattle of the wood and the low, comforting hum of machinery. Between them, spiraling through space and time at an alarming rate, Amy and Rory make love, and they make memories that they will never let go.

\---

River knows the stories. But they’re just that—stories, words. They roll around inside her head as her mother—as Amy looks at her with huge eyes full of all the terror and panic rampaging around in River’s insides that she has to keep there, locked away. But Amy radiates it; it swells up from inside her and reaches a breaking point in her wide, hopeful eyes. The Doctor is dead and she’s looking to River to fix things, to tell her what to do.

River knows the stories. She’s been warned and she’s been prepared and she’s kept secrets and she’s been ready, recounting words that have and haven’t been said yet to her in silence, relying on the emotions and the things yet to come for these people, this step-by-backwards-step unrecognizable family. Words yet to be said, thoughts yet to be thought.

There has always been a sadness in her mother’s eyes, a sadness that River believes probably exists in the eyes of any and every person who lives long enough. But it is that sadness that she sees now being born, that will become hard and tough as a rock, as a heart fossilized and strong as petrified bone over time.

Her own heart feels as if it were about to crack into two. And if it did, it would split open like a viciously sliced watermelon, spilling its juice and contents every which way, made better for the slicing, for the opening—for the taking. Perhaps it would grow beyond that, though, be more than an open thudding fruit heart. Maybe it would grow old but not decay, be chipped away by the ebb and flow of time that runs like a thousand ancient rivers carving out canyons of immense and extending rock in their wake. And that would be the place that she cradled, kept safe inside her chest: just an endlessly growing and maturing canyon-space stretching and morphing inside her body until it grew wide enough to envelop her own self whole, and the selves of those all around her that she loved, to pull them further and deeper into a quiet cave inside the secret schism of herself where she could keep them safe and protected and silent for a million million lifetimes, watching their faces chisel themselves into the landscape like rocks for all common purposes woven immortal into the ever-shifting sands of time.

Perhaps that’s what it had been like for her mother. It is with a determined and decided upon lack of sorrow that River contemplates Amy now, a split second of immense pain swallowed up and ignored inside herself, wrapped instead around an even briefer moment of joy. Joy for a chance at some understanding that exceeds herself, that exceeds what normal of a timeline she could have kept and called her childhood, as some mirage of an innocence or a happiness to be lost only to be regained here, in quiet moments of sheer terror and sadness shared with the young effigy of who is to be and was and always has been her mother.

“You play with time and it plays with you,” River says, wonders if she’s echoing future words of her mother or if her mother will be the one echoing the words she speaks now. Maybe both or maybe it doesn’t matter and maybe that’s half the point. “You try to change it and instead it changes you.” Amy stares at her as if she were a ghost, as if the words are leaking up out of her subconscious, whispering from some dream she once had but then forgot.

\---

The TARDIS is a world unto herself, and a gateway to every other world in the universe. Everyone who steps inside knows that. Some know it longer than others; some know it more than others. But everyone who sets foot within her four seemingly-so-small walls knows, or at least recognizes on some primeval level that reverberates through their skulls as they encompass things so unfathomably large inside minds so physically limited.

The TARDIS is like her own fairytale, wrapped up in her own endless disguises, and the more you strip away the larger she becomes in inexplicable trickery or magic.

When the Doctor sleeps, and he doesn’t sleep as often as his human companions, or as often as he should, for that matter, but when it happens, it’s in the safety of his TARDIS. His room is tucked away in a corner down a hallway that Amy and Rory have walked by a hundred thousand times, but they haven’t seen it. Why should they? He draws lines, he explained that to Amy once, or tried to over her teasing. One of those lines is his room. Besides, how breaking of the magic, the mystery would that be? I’m the Doctor and this is where I sleep?

No, the people who end up there end up on...once, he would have thought “their own accord.” Now he wonders if it has more to do with the TARDIS herself than anything else. The beautiful sentience that is at the heart of his TARDIS, weaving together stray aspects of his life that he didn’t know were in need of being woven together.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then, when River yawns, pries his hands away from the console, admonishes him as if he’s a small child who doesn’t know better. “You’re tired. Let’s take a break.”

“ _I’m_ tired? Maybe you are but I’m fine, thanks, I’m the Doctor—”

“—not a robot. Come on,” her voice softens, and so does something in her eyes. She reaches a hand to cup around his face, that startling familiar gesture that she seems so unwilling to let go, even when she lets all other forms of familiarity slip away, lie by discarded and forgotten.

He supposes he should allow her that.

“Come to bed,” she says, and it’s far more gentle, far less suggestive than he would have expected.

He follows as she leads him up the stairs, through winding passages, straight to his bedroom. Shouldn’t be surprised that she knows where it is, shouldn’t be surprised when she turns to him, when she runs hands down the front of his chest, when she looks up like she’s asking for permission for something, like she’s asking if this is it, if this is the last, the end.

And he supposes he should allow her that, too. Kisses her, folds her into him as she folds him into her, as they collapse and open in continual and swelling repetition on the sheets of his bed, wrapped around and filling each other in ways that are as perfect as they are familiar and as terrifying as they are novel. Around them the walls are alive and singing, folding them in and spreading them out like children of light, children of time, safe inside a place called home.

\---

When the Doctor sleeps, River thinks his face looks heartbreakingly old and longingly peaceful. People are supposed to look younger, freer, when they sleep, or at least River’s fairly certain that’s how it’s meant to work. Not the Doctor. The Doctor looks like he takes off whatever pretense of youth he normally wears—wears for the comfort of those around him, so they aren’t constantly faced with the vertiginous enigma that would be his true face, or as true a face as he could have.

But that peace, that’s how it’s supposed to be, that’s the sort of face a sleeping face is meant to wear. Except on the Doctor it’s tied so closely in with the longing—as if this is a peace he has to fight for, as if beneath his eyelids which twitch ever so slightly over his shifting eyes there are some dark dreams that he runs from like he runs from all things. Dreams that keep him awake, that make even sleep a struggle, another battle he didn’t ask for but desperately has to win.

River shifts, settles more comfortably on her side, facing him. The sheets are blue and cool beneath her bare skin. Blue—of course the sheets are blue, she swallows a laugh around that, keeps it in a smile instead, then hides even that in the crook where his shoulder and his neck dip to collarbone. He shifts besides her, involuntarily moving closer, nudging himself into her warmth.

River feels as wide on the inside as the TARDIS, as if everyone and everything is trying to shove its way either inside or out of her all at once, worlds inside worlds inside worlds. She feels immensely heavy and unbearably light, and she brushes a hand down the side of her Doctor’s face, feels his breath regulated and slow on the side of her neck, feels the soft shuddering beat of his hearts against her chest, her side. She wants so much to encompass him, to take in those burning fragments of light that she knows shoot and spark through him like lightning, that torment and illuminate him. She sees that pain in moments: grave, dark, and terrible moments, lighting up in his face. She feels it when they move against one another in the perpetual twilight that the TARDIS holds them so welcoming in.

But River knows her limits like she knows her role, has seen it through so far and now it’s almost over, now the end is approaching, speeding down at her like the ominous outline of a storm coming up a radar screen. So she holds the Doctor and observes in soft, slow moments as he unconsciously moves closer, holds her in return, dreaming horrible and beautiful dreams that he hasn’t told her yet and will never tell her again.

And she knows, better than most, how the TARDIS isn’t so much an anomaly, isn’t something magical subjugated only to Time Lords and their sciences, but is instead something sacred. People are as big as TARDISes, or TARDISes are as big as people, and she will hold all the people and places and ideas and things that she loves and hates and is and was and will be deep inside the crater where her heart belongs, until the day it flickers, skips a beat, and finally goes out.

\---

“What if,” Amy laughs before even finishing, splays her fingers out wide and wild, eyes bright and mischievous, “what if you had a box, like a TARDIS box inside the TARDIS, and it was bigger on the inside, right, and then inside that, you had _another_ box that was bigger on the inside and inside that, another—”

“Where’s this going?” interrupts Rory, staring at her as if she’s started growing a second head.

“...wouldn’t that be cool?” She leans against the TARDIS console and waggles her eyebrows at the Doctor. “And would that even be possible?”

“Sure,” responds the Doctor, still preoccupied with the controls. Amy knows that face, it’s his I’m-not-really-paying-attention-to-you-face, and she hates that face, especially when she’s having brilliant clever ideas about endless boxes and all the stuff you could potentially keep in them.

“That would be kind of neat,” amends Rory, and Amy tilts her head in his direction, grinning in approval of his approval.

“Oh, oh, I know,” Rory exclaims suddenly. “What if you had a swimming pool that was bigger on the inside?”

“How does _that_ work?”

“Like the water could be a portal, to another world, a sort of TARDIS-y water world—”

“Okay yeah, that would be kind of epic. Don’t you think, Doctor?” Amy nudges him playfully with an elbow.

“Uh-huh.”

“Worlds tucked inside worlds tucked inside worlds.” Amy leans her head back, stares at light reflecting on the ceiling of the control room. The orange glow gathers in her hair; she’s unaware of the way Rory stares at her, the polar opposite of the Doctor’s amiable indifference.

“Amy,” he says, breaking her ignorant fixation on shadows dancing across the slope of the ceiling.

“Hm?”

“Let’s go exploring.” There’s a light in his eyes, a light that reflects the TARDIS’ lights, that draws from it, pools it in and replicates its way through his irises, down his visual nerves, seeps in strange and new ways through his body.

Amy recognizes that look. “We’re going to go explore your TARDIS,” she announces, spinning back away from Rory in a flurry of red hair, leaning in and placing a hand intrusively on a panel near the Doctor’s own busy and undecipherable handiwork.

“Mm, all right.”

“Find all your secret cabinets and raid them.”

“Sounds good.”

“Probably have sex in the swimming pool.”

“Have fun.”

Amy shrugs at a mildly mortified Rory, grabs his hand and goes running up the stairs.

The Doctor’s left fiddling with the controls, murmuring to himself or to his TARDIS. He jams up at a lever, pulls down another, grins and whoops loudly at the result. “There you go,” he pats the console adoringly, and then stops, burrowing his eyebrows together in delayed concentration. By the time he twirls around, the room is already empty. “Hang on, the—the _swimming pool_?”

\---

The TARDIS wonders how many hearts become smaller, contract back in on themselves with the passage of time. It is a difficult thing, she thinks, to exist so linearly, so simply. Even for her Thief, who is able to travel and transcend in ways impossible for others, it must be hard, must be so strange inside his head. Time drudges on and stretches them all out, wears them down, like water chipping away at stone, until they are thin, fragile things, ready to be snapped or scattered.

But if that is so, and she believes it is, in the dark and warm places of herself that could be called her “heart” if such a word were used to describe them, then her Thief is an anomaly. That doesn’t surprise her; she has always known he is special. Because unlike those normal passengers and travelers of time, his hearts don’t become smaller by the process. Worn down, wearied, burdened—perhaps these words and others could be applied. But _smaller_ is so drastically wrong, she feels it, reverberates it in her insides; she echoes it in her wheezing chaotic descent back and forth along the cataclysms of the universe.

No, her Thief’s hearts get bigger and bigger, she can feel it. Can feel them rising up and swelling inside his chest, growing and grown as each day (or something like it) goes by.

It isn’t only thanks to him. On his own... Those times are the darkest, when her Thief is alone, and worse than that, so lonely. Of course he’s never truly alone—he has her, and their connection is sacrosanct and strong. But he needs others, others more like him than she can be (except for once, and the memory or the moment of it makes her smile, makes something within her come alight as if touched). He needs walking, talking beings—the smart ones, the kind ones, the funny ones, the brave ones. How much they need him, that is almost taken for granted, but how much _he_ needs them in return... They are what truly make him special, what fills him up in the cold, in the long and perturbed expanse of space and time. And that is why she chooses them for him. Not just the sad and lonely ones, not just the wonderful ones, waiting without knowing it for their own greatness to be unlocked. Time unfolds them all, brings them together, but she is at once Time’s instrument and an actor who works in the taming of that very Time, one who helps set up the dams that keep it contained at bay. So she chose for him the Bad Wolf to heal the rawness raging inside his hearts after the War, after such great sadness, when he came closer to collapsing in on himself like a dying star than ever before. And now she has chosen him a Song to be sung in his veins, to help ease him out of the responsibilities of the lonely god he has taken so carelessly upon his tired shoulders.

Together they all move him forward, make him better, these precious children of time. Without them, who would he be? How many regular, sad hearts shrink down with the years, shrivel up with pain, harden against hardships and against wonder? Not her Thief. Her Thief is an anomaly, whirling through the universe, a man of a many faces but of two hearts—two hearts that expand rather than stretch themselves too thin, as if taking in every corner, every last heartache and thrill of the universe in-between their own sides until they might (but never do, surely cannot) burst.

\---

He supposes this is something that gets easier the more you’ve done it, really. Although they have done it, a bit, or something like it, and he says something along those lines, sorts of blurts out a, “Yes well there were a few...interesting experiences, but nothing too very, very er, explicit, exactly, but all very good I mean—” and that’s when River had said, “Shut up,” which apparently, as far as he can tell from the handful of past evidence he’s collected on the subject so far, is code for “I’m going to stick my tongue down your throat now.” And that’s what she does, essentially, although in a bit of a—nicer, perhaps?—fashion than that sounds like in his head. Well, nicer in the sort of electric shudder that runs almost unexpectedly through him, but still fairly rough in the way they sort of topple backwards and his lower backside slams against the TARDIS console.

“Oh.” They break for air and the Doctor straightens his bowtie nervously. River must see something in his eyes then, because she stops, takes the smallest of steps back to survey him.

“You don’t want to do this,” she says, eyebrows furrowing together. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t think.” Her sentence trails off, such an uncharacteristically River thing to do, and it nearly makes him panic. River’s hand has moved to unconsciously fondling a cluster of buttons on the console, tapping out what seems to be an involuntary rhythm. He wonders if she’s wondering if he’s noticing the look on her face, the one that’s wondering whether he’ll oblige, whether he is enough of the Doctor she knows yet to go along. He knows that look; it looks as if her heart is literally breaking in half and she’s standing in front of him trying to swallow the pieces back down. Trying not to hurt him with her hurt.

Something inside his own hearts moves, a sharp pang, a suppressed memory of a woman crashing full-force into his life and making demands on him that were more than he expected or could fully process, and then sacrificing herself in front of him, in his place. Watching that woman say goodbye, so strong, so full of promises and hope, so unwilling to let him see even then how torn she was inside. How broken he had made her.

“Can I tell you a secret?” he asks her, the words barely above a whisper.

“Always,” she replies.

“After I first met you,” the words come spilling out of his mouth almost of their own accord; he flexes fingers against warm metal, doesn’t move an inch, “you were all I could think of for days, for weeks, I don’t know for how long. And it terrified me. I wanted to run, do you know that? No, you couldn’t know that. But I did. I don’t like—I. It’s odd. Time, it is. You’re my future, River. I really just wanted to run from that, from you. But I don’t—I don’t think I want to run, just now. I don’t want to run anymore.”

His words hang in the air, heavy and uncertain between them. “I need to know that you want this,” River tells him, and there’s a pain in her voice. “That you really do.”

He reaches for her then, feels just like a mirror image, like the world tilting upside down and his insides getting lost and light, as he places a hand against the side of her face in that way she did to him when they—when he first met her. “I think,” he murmurs, “you know as well as anyone that I only ever do what I want to.”

“Liar,” she laughs, but their voices are just whispers now, just a whisper’s breadth away, and he moves and she moves, they cross that distance together. Lips soft against lips, and there is a shake that starts there beneath his ribcage and extends through his body suddenly, stark, wild. But River roots him, like their first kiss, he thinks, remembers—feels her hands clutch at his back, feels the softness of her body as she presses up against him. Then he opens his mouth and this time he doesn’t pull away but he does stop thinking, lets her in, tongue and warmth and such overpowering softness, slipping into him with a desperation that has grown, elongated and been strengthened through tunnels of time that he knows he is as apprehensive to enter as she is to leave.

“This is another secret, or prediction, or preview, or what have you,” she tells him when they break off for air, and she flings his bowtie off for effect, fingers moving quickly to undo the buttons beneath that. He laughs, a short concise and yes, nervous laugh. He remembers that first kiss, in the Stormcage prison with her face so light and playful and how he had wondered what it would be like to put his hands in her hair, to take from her what she was so seemingly willing to offer, what she was so hopeful to receive from him. He remembers the sound of thunder, rattling through stone and metal and through him as she had pulled him close and opened a door, or closed one, or both. This time he doesn’t stop himself from burying his fingers in her hair.

“Mm,” she responds, and he moves his fingers in gentle motions, even more thrilled than he thought he would be to be touching it. Not that he’s sat around thinking about touching River’s hair. Or stayed up unable to sleep thinking about touching it, or doing any, well, _human_ things thinking about it, no, he’s the Doctor, he’s above those sort of primeval and purely physical notions—

“A-ah.” His thoughts are interrupted, brought to a sudden halt when River’s hands find their way inside his trousers, wrapping around where he’s—well. Well isn’t that—

“Interesting,” he chokes out, reaches back to grab whatever’s at hand to keep him standing full upright, and that’s—that’s the TARDIS console, and oh, it’s sort of slipping under his hands now, slippery with the sweat on his palms, and that’s...that must be interesting too, he supposes, or supposes he would suppose, if River weren’t—stroking him and this. This may not quite be the exact time for coherent thought.

As if sensing this, River reaches with her free hand, runs a finger slowly and softly down his half-open lips. “You’re all right? You’ll tell me if you want me to stop, right? I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“You aren’t really at risk for that at the moment, I don’t think, no.” He would flinch at the slightly faster-paced and higher-pitched way the words escape from his mouth, if he had his proper senses about him, if it didn’t feel like his hearts were beating double-time through his chest. Anyway, it’s half a lie, of course, but the half-truth of it feels...more prevalent, at the moment. 

River smiles, presses closer, doesn’t let him out of her grip. “Good,” she says and moves her hand firmly against him.

It’s as if—all the places of himself, the worries and the anxieties and the responsibilities and the guilt, as if they’ve all tightened up inside him and localized, and River’s there, with beautiful, perfect hands moving him, playing him like an instrument, strumming at a string pulled tight and made of fluttering, desperate skin. As if all the loneliness—there’s so much of that, too—is sort of swelling up out of a hole inside himself. It’s not often that he lets people in, not like this, so close where they can get—can get so burnt.

But River’s already been burnt by him and she will be and he can’t prevent that or change that, and he owes her for that, he knows, has always known, known it the most in the moments when he’s denied it. River’s pressed up against him and she’s making these noises, little ones, and he’s amazed, in love with that, the way that this—that doing this to him, for him, makes her react like this. He reaches up, still a bit uncertain, this—he isn’t used to this sort of thing, certainly not in this body, not in this new self, still a bit—what was it, all that time ago, in Amy’s backyard? The steering’s off—like that, except a more specific type of steering but surely for her, for River he could try. He could learn.

Thank some goodness in the universe that she’s wearing a sort of sensible dress-thing; with a quick and nearly unconscious decision, he lifts it up and presses fingers against the place where she’s warm and so—wet.

That’s also interesting.

“ _Fuck_ ,” gasps River, and the hand that’s wrapped and moving around the Doctor tightens, her free arm swings wildly, lands and grips somewhere in his hair, short fingernails digging into his scalp.

“Is that—is that all right?” the Doctor stutters dumbly, and oh—dumb, he’s feeling really quite dumb, that is most certainly new. “I mean was that a good ‘fuck’ or a bad ‘fuck,’ I didn’t I mean I—”

River’s eyes snap open and she bites her lower lip in a way that, as far as the Doctor can tell, means she’s trying not to laugh. Okay, not the best response in this situation, but also not the worst. He guesses. “It was a great ‘fuck,’” she replies.

Well. That must be a sign to carry on, then.

He does, and so does she, falling into a rhythm, a sort of almost-desperation that’s as simple and as normal as it is strange and thrilling. They hold on to one another as if they need the other to stay upright, like two planets in perfect orbit, spinning and swaying in each other’s gravity. He clutches handfuls of her hair in one hand, accidentally pulls a bit harder than he means to when she sends a particularly sharp thrill up through his body. He gasps at that, at what she can do to him with just her hands, her perfect, brilliant hands, and she gasps at the hair-tug. He starts to apologize, the words rising from his throat when she groans, murmurs, “Do it again,” against his lips. He feels it more than he hears it, and he obliges, with another echoing murmur, when she tilts her head, grinds up against him. The console of the TARDIS is a cold and stark and grounding presence against his lower back, his legs; she holds him up as much as River’s hands and limbs and lips, is an aspect of reality contrasted against the heat, the heartbeat reverberating heavy and quick from River’s chest, heaving against his in a way that makes him all the more tight, wound up and throbbing in River’s hand.

River makes him come with a noise barely recognized in his own head, the zigzagging cacophony of his thoughts drowned out in the wave of that moment—a tidal wave rising up, up, and cresting at the edge, dragged purposefully and powerfully to the shore by the light, the gravity of the moon. Dies off in the same way, like a sort of buzzing noise settling in the back of his head, a greyness to the world after its sudden over-saturation; a sense of colors slipping in after the outlining or overpowering of everything in shimmers of flash-white.

It’s hardly enough. The realization hits him with a sudden and undeniable force. The consequence appears as quickly and as easily, as if it had always been in his mind, waiting, not discovered but rather uncovered, transmogrified in his mind’s eye as something that he has not stumbled upon desiring, but always desired, always been waiting for in those dark and unexplored corners of himself, now still lit up in the afterglow of the light that River gave, silvery shadow-outlines in the dull shine of the moon.

She moves away from him, slowly, and he almost whimpers at that, at the loss of her warmth. But it’s only to shift, rearranging herself against the console. She yields against it welcomingly, and that still manages to send some sentiment of a spark through him, to see her arch her back against the TARDIS, his TARDIS and, yes, perhaps _his_ River, a bit, or at least beginning to be so, or ending, or. Or. He discards the line of thought, instead relying on his hands.

She knows him—knows the geography of his body so intimately, while he is just beginning to discover her. And he is nothing if not interested in discovery, in the shape and wonder of new lands. He replaces the movement, the stroking of his hands with his mouth, with tongue; moves his hands to her thighs, pushing them aside and up ever so slightly. The noise she makes at that is wonderful and he files it away, keeps it tucked up into some secret edge of himself. If he glances up, and he does, he can see her, body stretched out along the console, shuddering in some sort of discordant and beautiful rhythm to the flickering of the lights, to the twirling motions, as if she belongs, is being welcomed in. She holds onto a lever with her left hand, clenches fingers in rotations of tighter, looser, around that—the other hand is clinging to his hair, ruffling and yanking it as he moves her, as he moves the parts of her that are softest, warmest, most secret.

And when she comes it is with a sound that belongs foremost to her, but so achingly also to the Doctor. He stores it away in a cavern by a sea pulled by lunar forces somewhere on the cusp of mind, on the doorway to spirit or the gateway to soul. She stretches wondrously out, against him, against the TARDIS, the hand in his hair falling loosely down the side of his face, as he moves up towards her, leans over her, still feels the shaking, still can hear the distant thundering heartbeat.

She’s pieces of his people, he thinks suddenly, out of nowhere—pieces of time and pieces of a world he never, ever thought to touch, to taste, to be near again. And she’s pieces of him, too, distilled and falling backwards through time, like a rainstorm, a safety net, the tug of the moon, comforting in its strong stillness, in its relative continuance.

She cradles his face with hands so gentle, pulls him down for another kiss, one that’s light and intimate and everything. “Oh,” she says, and it’s more just a breath, exhaled and shared between them. Then she laughs, quietly, in that same almost airless fashion, as if whatever is passing between them is something so sacred, so fragile that the wrong word or movement could send it shattering, make it break, like a bubble, like a dream within a dream.

\---

How do you catch someone who moves like water—ephemeral, a trick of the light, and yet with a will that has a power behind it exceeding the stars, a will that gathers around itself, that grows, that waits? Rory doesn’t know the answer; the thought of ever having to discover or come up with one makes him feel slightly sick to his stomach.

But Amy isn’t something in need of catching, isn’t a puzzle to be solved or a question waiting to be answered. Amy is a light that fills up the dark places that eat away inside of him, when he loses himself in the corridors of himself so expansive and daunting, the hallways extending down two-thousand years of memory and almost-memory.

Right now, Amy is lit in a calm eeriness composed of neon blue and shadows, the reflections the water in the TARDIS swimming pool makes off the walls and ceilings creating oddly haunting patterns across her pale skin. This room hasn’t always looked like this, at least he doesn’t think so, but suddenly he finds himself unsure. Could it really be that the TARDIS has made this lighting for them, is aware and alive on a level like that, even now?

He’s not sure, but it might be half of what’s making his heart beat so hard, that other-worldly sense of Something More just on the edge of perception, in the tickling back of his mind. Amy is all different shades of blue and dark, but her white skin looks like luminescent marble as she shrugs off her shirt, stands in front of him with a look that can only be called enticing, drawing him further in to some invisible realm that they will inhabit and transcend together. Her back is to the pool, and she pulls off the rest of her clothing piece by piece, eyes never leaving his, before turning and diving in.

Rory follows her in a flurry of far less coordinated movements. Clothes come off and get flung to the side; he may manage to get his head caught in his shirt somewhere in the process, may almost forget to remove his socks, but finally joins her. She swims languidly and naturally, inviting him in a chase, a sort of odd and fundamentally hopeless play of hide-and-go-seek beneath the rippling blue.

When he reaches her, Rory pulls her as close to him as their weightlessness below the surface allows. He kisses her and she kisses him in that airless world. It’s strange, he will note, sometime later, when they’re still wet and catching their breath, stretched out naked on the cold tiled surface besides the pool, watching the blue reflections dance on the ceiling. Strange that in that water, making love to Amy, he felt suddenly, the greatest distance, the greatest awareness of himself in space, in time.

It is as if in that moment he became, for a second, a second in a huge tunnel of two-thousand years or more, startlingly awake. Layers of skin peeled back, a different and not-different self, a more vital self blinked open barely used eyes and saw them for what they were—entities of light and dust, wrapped in skin wrapped in one another, wrapped in liquid-blue wrapped in solid-blue, shuddering through the canals of time. And the weightlessness then was not just water holding them as they spun around one another, sources of friction in a frictionless expanse, thrusting into each other, linked by a system of gravity perfect and wordless between them. No, they were more than that, he could see it, could feel it vibrating through his veins, as large as the universe and all contained inside his throbbing skull. They were surrounded by stars, by forever dark and heat, by light that stretched as far as his fogged two-thousand year memory and existed just as hazily, just as unsurely. And the only thing that was real then was the other—he became because Amy was, and he knew she felt it too, suspended in the starlit black, wrapping her arms and her legs long and beautiful around him, drawing him further into her, further into himself.

Rory doesn’t mention this, in the afterglow, with Amy’s head against his shoulder, her hair wet and heavy and dripping on their skin. But he knows it, knows it as simply and intrinsically as the heartbeat in his chest, in her wrist; in the way they watch the ceiling as if counting stars or connecting constellations, or as if being counted, being connected.

\---

The TARDIS folds them into herself like a mother tucking her children into bed, like time winding her inhabitants and trespassers into the creases, the wrinkles of herself. Like time, like light, like love—the TARDIS keeps them safe as secrets, spins gleefully through space with their exhilarating infinitudes lurching in her insides.

The Orange One grows or grew or will grow another life inside of her, a huge life, a song and a melody, and the TARDIS wonders where those words are the same, where they are different. Where do their meanings overlap and where do they diverge? She can’t be sure, not in the way that is human, that is understanding by language, by clear communication. But in the way that is infinite, that is the transcendence of so many dimensions that she wears as a cloak or a blanket—she thinks or at least likes to believe she thinks in whatever thought-kind of way she can that she knows, that she can draw lines in sand that both exist and never will.

There’s a terror, though, inside that Orange One’s stomach—a terror that’s different than the life she grows, but all tangled up with the essence of it. And is that terror, the TARDIS wonders, late at night when the people she cradles in her crooks, her shadows and her coolness, when they shudder and break and coalesce like raindrops hitting rooftops in the dark—is that terror the root, the center of life, of what it is to be a living, breathing thing?

They are all of them Russian nesting dolls, opening up and containing another shell inside another shell inside another, expanding outwards in minute motions. But the Orange One is more so, or at least more so a metaphor than the others, than that Pretty One and her lovely Thief, because the Orange One has a hollow inside herself that isn’t really so much a hollow at all. It’s a cocoon, a place where she grows the future, where potential futures incubate safe as the secrets the TARDIS so cherishingly holds herself.

Laughter echoes up through her passageways, down through her esophagus, resounds in her stomach. Some damp and blue wetness inside of her roars and sings when bodies dance and touch within it. The TARDIS lets it all resound through her organs, leak out through her skin; infects worlds with it, or at least imagines she infects, and that’s good enough. The desire makes the idea, the idea the thought, the thought the reality. Boxes inside boxes inside boxes, dolls inside dolls inside dolls, eggs inside eggs insides eggs. She will stack them up, watch them run and jump and leap and create. The stories inside her are moving, fluttering butterflies in her depths, and she will and has and is weaving them together, into a full story which beats with one heart of incomplete terror, one heart of endless joy.

\---

When River realizes she’s about to die, it’s a bit surreal. That’s not surprising; life is all she’s known, and knowing that one day you’ll die isn’t the same as knowing that in five minutes you’ll be dead. Watching other people die isn’t the same either. Watching other people die is pain—a jolt, a terror through your chest, resonating down your spine.

Knowing you’re about to die is, oddly, a bit of a peace.

The Doctor’s eyes are closed, but his face doesn’t remind her of his sleeping face. Of course, his face isn’t the right one anyway. She hates herself for that, for that thought, but it echoes, bounces off the recesses of her skull without her being able to stop. Must have something to do with the whole “about to die” thing. Becomes more difficult to think clearly.

It’s just. Of course he’s the Doctor. She knows that, knows the tricks and pitfalls of regeneration, knows the way there’s a self that lies deeper underneath, fills in the cracks, like sediment filling in a river. But it would just be nice, maybe, to see a face she knows, and more importantly, a face that knows her.

She can’t. This is where it ends. Or where it begins. God, she hates that man for that, right now, for going on without her.

Maybe, she thinks dimly, maybe if I just sit here and wait, time will stop, take pity on us, allow us something. Maybe if I stay still, right here, I won’t have to leave him.

A voice rises up, her own, echoes out of her past. _Maybe I could go with you._

She turns back to the panel—the hope, the frantic, giddy and horrific hope of that moment gone. It had only lasted a second, hung suspended and awful in the silent air, before she saw the numbers, the countdown continued with indifference. The march of time immemorial, with one last laugh in the face saved up for her.

There’s a light flickering in her peripheral vision; she focuses on attuning her thoughts to the dull pattern of it, of becoming a numb and mindless repetition of _red, blank blank, red red, blank, red_ —

“Oh no, no no _no_ ,” interrupts the Doctor. She closes her eyes for a second before opening them back to him.

Just like a photograph. Just like looking at a photograph years before you knew them. The sorrow of that wants to burst out of her, strangle her, destroy her. First her parents, then him. She wants more than anything in the world to cry, to shake everyone and scream at them, _you did this, you made me, you you you_.

She smiles. Says words that mean so much, but not the words she’s already said. Not the words she hasn’t said yet. But he’s staring at her as if he’s about to break, at least there’s that—not that she wants him to be in pain, but it comforts her in some way, some way she hopes is more than selfishness. As if perhaps some echo of herself could reach back to him through the past, could touch and remind him of a life he hasn’t lived yet.

And god, she loves that man for that, then, for going on without her. For wearing his faces so strong and kind and good, for giving her the secrets and the promises and the love that he can, and for protecting her from all the rest.

The last ten seconds of her life arrive with as much certainty as all the other moments added up and composing one whole have done. _Spoilers_ is the word she manages out, alight and alive in one last resounding moment with the knowledge of the world he steps into. _I love you_ is the secret she takes with her to this world of understanding she has been rewound into bit by precious bit.

\---

Does he shed them, like a skin, watch them all fall off and clatter on cold tiles? Count the scales, count them up and keep them locked away safe inside a jar somewhere hidden underneath his bed? Does he lose them, those brilliant, resoundingly frustrating and wondrous people, when everything explodes into a shuddering burst of light and like time he slithers forward, shuddering and blinking, a new man to face a new world? Everything changes—not just the face and the ticks and the cravings—but the world, too, the fabric and the essence and the movement. It flows just a little differently against little-different skin, and all the songs taste just a little warmer or colder or higher or lower, something shifted on a never-ending scale of light and thunder.

Perhaps perception is just that, just acknowledgement of some sentience underneath a rippling surface, peering out through all its openings to experience worlds made new by all the new grids being lined up and stared out from. And perception will never, ever be the same as forgetting.

The answer, then, is no. He doesn’t shed them, he doesn’t leave them behind, he doesn’t and can’t spread his arms and fly away light and soaring and unbearable and radiant. He swallows fistfuls of air around lungs which have-always will-always will-never be pumping oxygen through a two-hearted body, and moves. He moves, but they stay—if there is one thing they’re good at it’s making their mark, it’s carving out little messages into the fabric of space and time and stuff that blast a constant message of “I am here, I am here, I am here” far into the dark, the untraveled spaces in-between all things sparkling and vast and explored. He moves, but they stay—small craters embedded into the place of him that does not could not will never be moving.

And where is that place, that “soul,” that faceless self that throbs and cries and laughs and loves and in a slow-motion all-encompassing burn is slowly dying? Beneath the layers of skin and the scabs of people encrusted in? Where is this fundamental “self” that moves forward so much more resiliently than most? Is it an extension of Time herself, the endlessly winding and magnificent goddess of the universe, forever feeding back upon herself, a contraction and an expansion eternal? Will he return to her then, just a river fed without a fight into the ocean, taking all his gravel and gold with him?

These are the questions he sees in color and hears in sound, when he dreams. These are the questions which pour as golden light screaming from his throat, his every pore, every edge of his physical being as it shifts, sheds its outer layers, its skin, hurtling and throwing him forward like a bouncing ball tossed gleefully and sacredly between the hands of Our Goddess, Time.


End file.
